[Fic] Right of Way
Mar. 21st, 2021 06:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chirurgiqueTitle: Right of Way
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Relationship: Kairi & Riku
Rating: PG
Content notes: potential vehicular violence, animal imperilment
Words: 1,946
Summary: After the defeat of Xemnas’s Organization XIII and the return of our heroes to the Destiny Islands, Riku and Sora have received summons to complete a vital task: their Mark of Mastery exam. But before leaving, Riku is charged with an even more vital task: teaching Kairi to drive.
The ambient sounds of the Gummi Ship’s normal operation chirped melodiously in the background. Riku found the noise soothing, like a reassurance that everything was moving along steadily, but any calming effect was probably bouncing right off the solid wall formed by Kairi’s knotted shoulders.
Kairi’s grip was firm on the oversized steering wheel. Her face was determined, her posture tense. The pilot’s chair was pulled much farther forward than even Sora’s preferred setting, making the pilot herself seem coiled like a spring. The silence of her focus was audible.
“So...” Riku said, leaning casually against the side of the massive driver’s seat. “Are we going to move? Or...”
“Shh,” said Kairi. “I’m thinking.”
Riku waited a moment, but there was no further elaboration.
“You know, we don’t have to do this.”
“No, we do,” Kairi muttered.
“Do we?”
“Yes!” She rounded on him, but still kept clenched, like a gargoyle that could move only its head. Riku impressed upon himself very sternly that it would be rude to laugh.
“Riku, work with me here! With Master Yen Sid calling you and Sora away, who knows how long you’ll be gone, or what you’ll be doing!” She twisted and untwisted her mouth anxiously. “If you need me to come to your rescue, it’ll be a nonstarter if I can’t at least drive the ship! I can’t believe you’re trying to turn down a free getaway driver...”
Kairi was normally so charitable and patient with things she disliked that to see her get so frustrated felt like a rare sighting. Riku was put in mind of a particularly yappy dog, one so small and fluffy that its fury seemed more endearing than threatening. But a dog bite is a dog bite.
“I get it,” said Riku, conciliatory. “I know you’re really into this plan. I’m just trying to say that no one will be upset if you change your mind. There’s no pressure.”
“I know.” She sighed, and slumped a little. “But there can be pressure, you know? I’m really going to do this. You can go ahead and have high hopes.”
“Okay, but you don’t have to feel like it’s your responsibility. You can trust us to look after ourselves, too.”
“It’s not just for you two.” She shook her head. “I need to be able to come and go. I can’t just rely on someone swooping in and opening a dark portal for me anymore.” Absentmindedly, she took one hand off the wheel and put it gently over her own heart.
Riku felt a pang of guilt. He hated to think that memories of his own time as a denizen of the darkness were making her make that face.
After a moment Kairi shook her head again, and put both hands back on the wheel, seemingly rallying a little. “Anyway, I can definitely do this. But I need you to be as soothing and as complementary as possible.”
That surprised a smile out of him. “If that’s what the doctor ordered. But is it really that bad?”
“It just seems so easy to make a mess when you’re in control of something so huge,” she mumbled, reaching behind the steering wheel to run her fingers over the switches there. “Like, we could get hurt, or I could end up hurting someone else... or at least wrecking something that the King lent us in confidence...”
“Sure, but that’s why we’re practicing. If I’m a good enough teacher, then none of that will happen.”
“It just seems like a lot.” She frowned as she checked and double-checked the switches, though the two of them had confirmed they were all correct before Kairi had even sat down in the driver’s seat. “Plus, there are all sorts of things to keep track of...” Peering out the window, she eyed a dark shape several planet lengths ahead of them that was probably an asteroid, just visible in space through the top of the spherical windshield.
Riku followed her gaze. “That thing’s nothing to worry about, it’s way out of your path.” He tried to be the requested amount of reassuring.
“I’m just trying to make the best possible decisions.”
He snorted in surprised fondness. “Big words for somebody I saw jump off a balcony a couple weeks ago.”
Kairi sat up stalk-straight and goggled at him. “That was different! It was an emergency, and...”
He raised one eyebrow. “And?”
She went a bit quiet and looked back out the windshield. “And... I don’t know... we were right near the end. After that, it was going to be all over.” She sighed. “Like, if we were back in that castle right now, and you told me I had to drive the ship as fast as possible to get us all home, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But this feels so much more... on purpose.”
He looked hard at her face, still staring through the glass at the stars. “You can’t live your whole life in fight or flight.”
She grimaced a little. “Like I’d want to! I don’t ever want to have a bad time.” She glanced back at Riku. “Which is why we’re learning all this right now, so that if I ever do have to drive to save our lives, it’ll be totally breezy. Even if...”
“Even if it’s all very on purpose.”
“Right.” She looked back out in front of her, face set with conviction, hands and feet notably not doing anything differently.
“So... are we going to move now?”
Kairi took a deep breath and screwed up her face, like she was about to cannonball into the ocean. But instead she opened her eyes, staring lasers out through the windshield, and slowly began to move her knee. There was a mechanical whirring, a distant metallic creaking sound, and the ship slowly groaned into motion.
... Barely.
“Hey, good work,” said Riku, remembering that he was under requisition to be complementary. He couldn’t keep the tiniest hint of a smirk out of his voice, though, when he asked, “What do the readouts have to say about the speed?”
“Uh... one point five... miles per hour?”
“So, below normal walking speed.”
“I don’t know what normal walking speed is, so I can neither confirm nor deny,” Kairi replied innocently.
Riku was about to come back with further needling, but he noticed that her shoulders were shaking. “Well, you’re doing just fine.”
She took a deep breath in, and blew it out unevenly. “I told you we would move eventually.”
“Yeah, you sure told me. So, now that we’re moving, let’s—”
“Let’s just cruise for a bit before we try anything fancy.”
Riku leaned forward to get a better look at her face. She seemed more settled than before, but still tense. “Alright. Don’t forget to check your mirrors.”
A few moments passed, the placid bloops of the cockpit’s computer filling the silence. The Gummi Ship coasted on through the lane through space at a consistent glacial velocity.
A lock of hair that had been tucked behind Kairi’s ear fell out of place. She pursed her lips and tried to use her own breath to keep it clear of her vision.
“My hair is getting way too long.”
It probably wasn’t a comment meant for a reply, but Riku saw an opportunity to take her mind off her stress. “Oh, do you want me to try cutting it for you? I learned a lot from doing my own.”
Kairi couldn’t move to look at his face, but he could still see hers. Her eyebrows were apparently trying to escape into her self-diagnosed overlong bangs.
“Well, I’ve been thinking, um, that I might ask the three Good Fairies to do it. Since they use magic to change people’s style and all. I thought that would be fun,” she said, polite serenity radiating off of her in waves. “Do you think you would have fun getting your hair styled by the Good Fairies, Riku?”
“What? I just cut my hair, it’s way too early to think about cutting it again.”
“Oh, I was just thinking that you might want to get it a little more out of your eyes.”
“Eh, as long as it’s not so heavy anymore, it’s fine by me.”
“I see. That makes sense.” Kairi seemed a lot calmer now that she was back to her home turf of tactful nonadmission.
Riku was glad to see Kairi more comfortable, but that didn’t change the fact that the ship still wasn’t moving fast enough to reasonably learn anything about driving it. “So, about the ship’s speed...”
“Look at how smoothly we’re going along.”
“Right, but... you know that going too slow is dangerous too, right? There are all sorts of other things moving around in space, so for them you’re basically an obstacle at best, and a sitting duck at worst.”
“Right, but—”
“Plus, it’ll be harder to get out of the way if you need to make emergency manoeuvres.”
“Right, but...” She sighed. “How about we go at this speed for ten more minutes and then we go faster. Just so that I can get used to the controls.”
“Okay, but don’t chicken out.”
“I would never.”
“Don’t weasel out either.”
“I would never! Or, well, I won’t.” She grinned up at the windshield, even though her knuckles on the steering wheel were still bright white. Riku couldn’t help but smile a little too.
A handful of minutes passed, then a handful more. The longer it went on the funnier and more useless it seemed to be inching along like this. It was like a parody of a driving lesson. Riku almost wanted to tell Kairi to call it all off and that they’d try again another day, when there was a sudden flash of movement coming in from the right of the windshield.
Riku’s stomach dropped. His mind raced in a matter of milliseconds. That fuzzy pale blur was what? A person? A creature? Whatever it was, it was basically right on top of them, and it was facing down a milllion pound moving vehicle.
With a shriek, Kairi slammed on the brakes. The already barely-moving ship ground to an instant halt, the prow a hair’s breadth from Pluto the dog. Still traipsing along in what seemed like total blissful ignorance, he cleared the ship’s path, pranced around in a little circle, and jauntily hopped through the new dark portal that had materialized off the port side.
Kairi threw on the parking brake and put her hands to her head, screaming in frustration.
“What was that! What was that?!”
Riku couldn’t stop laughing.
“Riku!” She twisted in her chair to face him, pulling on her hair with both hands. “If I had been going any faster I wouldn’t have been able to stop in time!”
“Yeah, you’re right!”
“How am I supposed to learn if the universe is going to co-sign my worse impulses?!”
“I don’t know!”
She was still yelling, but now at least she was laughing as well. “What does it want from me!”
Coughing and chuckling, Riku wiped the tears from his eyes. He stood to offer Kairi some tissues, too.
As he did, the asteroid at the edge of their field of vision suddenly burst into a shower of lights, like a sparkler at the beach on a summer night. Both of them paused where they were in surprise, watching as flashes of blue and gold fell past the windshield, scattering shadows over the cockpit and across their faces. Finally, Kairi sighed extremely heavily, and took the tissues. Riku smiled back at her.
“I guess it has high hopes.”
Thanks for reading! Every single day of my life I think about how the KHIII novel had Kairi, who had already seen Riku’s KH3D haircut, say “I heard Riku cut his hair, tell him it looks much better now” without so much as laying eyes on the new look. Like, the novel writer probably just meant to compare his KHII hair to his KHIII hair and forgot that he had had a different style in between that Kairi had already seen. But I didn’t forget. And the implications with that in mind... just absolute decimation.
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Relationship: Kairi & Riku
Rating: PG
Content notes: potential vehicular violence, animal imperilment
Words: 1,946
Summary: After the defeat of Xemnas’s Organization XIII and the return of our heroes to the Destiny Islands, Riku and Sora have received summons to complete a vital task: their Mark of Mastery exam. But before leaving, Riku is charged with an even more vital task: teaching Kairi to drive.
The ambient sounds of the Gummi Ship’s normal operation chirped melodiously in the background. Riku found the noise soothing, like a reassurance that everything was moving along steadily, but any calming effect was probably bouncing right off the solid wall formed by Kairi’s knotted shoulders.
Kairi’s grip was firm on the oversized steering wheel. Her face was determined, her posture tense. The pilot’s chair was pulled much farther forward than even Sora’s preferred setting, making the pilot herself seem coiled like a spring. The silence of her focus was audible.
“So...” Riku said, leaning casually against the side of the massive driver’s seat. “Are we going to move? Or...”
“Shh,” said Kairi. “I’m thinking.”
Riku waited a moment, but there was no further elaboration.
“You know, we don’t have to do this.”
“No, we do,” Kairi muttered.
“Do we?”
“Yes!” She rounded on him, but still kept clenched, like a gargoyle that could move only its head. Riku impressed upon himself very sternly that it would be rude to laugh.
“Riku, work with me here! With Master Yen Sid calling you and Sora away, who knows how long you’ll be gone, or what you’ll be doing!” She twisted and untwisted her mouth anxiously. “If you need me to come to your rescue, it’ll be a nonstarter if I can’t at least drive the ship! I can’t believe you’re trying to turn down a free getaway driver...”
Kairi was normally so charitable and patient with things she disliked that to see her get so frustrated felt like a rare sighting. Riku was put in mind of a particularly yappy dog, one so small and fluffy that its fury seemed more endearing than threatening. But a dog bite is a dog bite.
“I get it,” said Riku, conciliatory. “I know you’re really into this plan. I’m just trying to say that no one will be upset if you change your mind. There’s no pressure.”
“I know.” She sighed, and slumped a little. “But there can be pressure, you know? I’m really going to do this. You can go ahead and have high hopes.”
“Okay, but you don’t have to feel like it’s your responsibility. You can trust us to look after ourselves, too.”
“It’s not just for you two.” She shook her head. “I need to be able to come and go. I can’t just rely on someone swooping in and opening a dark portal for me anymore.” Absentmindedly, she took one hand off the wheel and put it gently over her own heart.
Riku felt a pang of guilt. He hated to think that memories of his own time as a denizen of the darkness were making her make that face.
After a moment Kairi shook her head again, and put both hands back on the wheel, seemingly rallying a little. “Anyway, I can definitely do this. But I need you to be as soothing and as complementary as possible.”
That surprised a smile out of him. “If that’s what the doctor ordered. But is it really that bad?”
“It just seems so easy to make a mess when you’re in control of something so huge,” she mumbled, reaching behind the steering wheel to run her fingers over the switches there. “Like, we could get hurt, or I could end up hurting someone else... or at least wrecking something that the King lent us in confidence...”
“Sure, but that’s why we’re practicing. If I’m a good enough teacher, then none of that will happen.”
“It just seems like a lot.” She frowned as she checked and double-checked the switches, though the two of them had confirmed they were all correct before Kairi had even sat down in the driver’s seat. “Plus, there are all sorts of things to keep track of...” Peering out the window, she eyed a dark shape several planet lengths ahead of them that was probably an asteroid, just visible in space through the top of the spherical windshield.
Riku followed her gaze. “That thing’s nothing to worry about, it’s way out of your path.” He tried to be the requested amount of reassuring.
“I’m just trying to make the best possible decisions.”
He snorted in surprised fondness. “Big words for somebody I saw jump off a balcony a couple weeks ago.”
Kairi sat up stalk-straight and goggled at him. “That was different! It was an emergency, and...”
He raised one eyebrow. “And?”
She went a bit quiet and looked back out the windshield. “And... I don’t know... we were right near the end. After that, it was going to be all over.” She sighed. “Like, if we were back in that castle right now, and you told me I had to drive the ship as fast as possible to get us all home, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But this feels so much more... on purpose.”
He looked hard at her face, still staring through the glass at the stars. “You can’t live your whole life in fight or flight.”
She grimaced a little. “Like I’d want to! I don’t ever want to have a bad time.” She glanced back at Riku. “Which is why we’re learning all this right now, so that if I ever do have to drive to save our lives, it’ll be totally breezy. Even if...”
“Even if it’s all very on purpose.”
“Right.” She looked back out in front of her, face set with conviction, hands and feet notably not doing anything differently.
“So... are we going to move now?”
Kairi took a deep breath and screwed up her face, like she was about to cannonball into the ocean. But instead she opened her eyes, staring lasers out through the windshield, and slowly began to move her knee. There was a mechanical whirring, a distant metallic creaking sound, and the ship slowly groaned into motion.
... Barely.
“Hey, good work,” said Riku, remembering that he was under requisition to be complementary. He couldn’t keep the tiniest hint of a smirk out of his voice, though, when he asked, “What do the readouts have to say about the speed?”
“Uh... one point five... miles per hour?”
“So, below normal walking speed.”
“I don’t know what normal walking speed is, so I can neither confirm nor deny,” Kairi replied innocently.
Riku was about to come back with further needling, but he noticed that her shoulders were shaking. “Well, you’re doing just fine.”
She took a deep breath in, and blew it out unevenly. “I told you we would move eventually.”
“Yeah, you sure told me. So, now that we’re moving, let’s—”
“Let’s just cruise for a bit before we try anything fancy.”
Riku leaned forward to get a better look at her face. She seemed more settled than before, but still tense. “Alright. Don’t forget to check your mirrors.”
A few moments passed, the placid bloops of the cockpit’s computer filling the silence. The Gummi Ship coasted on through the lane through space at a consistent glacial velocity.
A lock of hair that had been tucked behind Kairi’s ear fell out of place. She pursed her lips and tried to use her own breath to keep it clear of her vision.
“My hair is getting way too long.”
It probably wasn’t a comment meant for a reply, but Riku saw an opportunity to take her mind off her stress. “Oh, do you want me to try cutting it for you? I learned a lot from doing my own.”
Kairi couldn’t move to look at his face, but he could still see hers. Her eyebrows were apparently trying to escape into her self-diagnosed overlong bangs.
“Well, I’ve been thinking, um, that I might ask the three Good Fairies to do it. Since they use magic to change people’s style and all. I thought that would be fun,” she said, polite serenity radiating off of her in waves. “Do you think you would have fun getting your hair styled by the Good Fairies, Riku?”
“What? I just cut my hair, it’s way too early to think about cutting it again.”
“Oh, I was just thinking that you might want to get it a little more out of your eyes.”
“Eh, as long as it’s not so heavy anymore, it’s fine by me.”
“I see. That makes sense.” Kairi seemed a lot calmer now that she was back to her home turf of tactful nonadmission.
Riku was glad to see Kairi more comfortable, but that didn’t change the fact that the ship still wasn’t moving fast enough to reasonably learn anything about driving it. “So, about the ship’s speed...”
“Look at how smoothly we’re going along.”
“Right, but... you know that going too slow is dangerous too, right? There are all sorts of other things moving around in space, so for them you’re basically an obstacle at best, and a sitting duck at worst.”
“Right, but—”
“Plus, it’ll be harder to get out of the way if you need to make emergency manoeuvres.”
“Right, but...” She sighed. “How about we go at this speed for ten more minutes and then we go faster. Just so that I can get used to the controls.”
“Okay, but don’t chicken out.”
“I would never.”
“Don’t weasel out either.”
“I would never! Or, well, I won’t.” She grinned up at the windshield, even though her knuckles on the steering wheel were still bright white. Riku couldn’t help but smile a little too.
A handful of minutes passed, then a handful more. The longer it went on the funnier and more useless it seemed to be inching along like this. It was like a parody of a driving lesson. Riku almost wanted to tell Kairi to call it all off and that they’d try again another day, when there was a sudden flash of movement coming in from the right of the windshield.
Riku’s stomach dropped. His mind raced in a matter of milliseconds. That fuzzy pale blur was what? A person? A creature? Whatever it was, it was basically right on top of them, and it was facing down a milllion pound moving vehicle.
With a shriek, Kairi slammed on the brakes. The already barely-moving ship ground to an instant halt, the prow a hair’s breadth from Pluto the dog. Still traipsing along in what seemed like total blissful ignorance, he cleared the ship’s path, pranced around in a little circle, and jauntily hopped through the new dark portal that had materialized off the port side.
Kairi threw on the parking brake and put her hands to her head, screaming in frustration.
“What was that! What was that?!”
Riku couldn’t stop laughing.
“Riku!” She twisted in her chair to face him, pulling on her hair with both hands. “If I had been going any faster I wouldn’t have been able to stop in time!”
“Yeah, you’re right!”
“How am I supposed to learn if the universe is going to co-sign my worse impulses?!”
“I don’t know!”
She was still yelling, but now at least she was laughing as well. “What does it want from me!”
Coughing and chuckling, Riku wiped the tears from his eyes. He stood to offer Kairi some tissues, too.
As he did, the asteroid at the edge of their field of vision suddenly burst into a shower of lights, like a sparkler at the beach on a summer night. Both of them paused where they were in surprise, watching as flashes of blue and gold fell past the windshield, scattering shadows over the cockpit and across their faces. Finally, Kairi sighed extremely heavily, and took the tissues. Riku smiled back at her.
“I guess it has high hopes.”
Thanks for reading! Every single day of my life I think about how the KHIII novel had Kairi, who had already seen Riku’s KH3D haircut, say “I heard Riku cut his hair, tell him it looks much better now” without so much as laying eyes on the new look. Like, the novel writer probably just meant to compare his KHII hair to his KHIII hair and forgot that he had had a different style in between that Kairi had already seen. But I didn’t forget. And the implications with that in mind... just absolute decimation.
